Sorry no picture. A spanking chair for incorrigible schoolgirls. Today we have a robospanker yesterday they had a prototype. It's a media hoax.

http://books.google.com/books?id=itIdAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA73

American Way, your link above appears only to go to a Google Book Search page for a volume called:

Proceedings of the ... Annual Congress of Correction of the American Correctional Association

To get at what I suspect you intend, which I think is to be found here it is necessary to take further action and insert a term in the search box. Many of us here are either elderly or incorrigibly lazy, in my case both, and we don't like having to take further action. I trust you'll remember this for the future when posting links!

Do you know of any way to see the full four pages concerned, extracts from only three of which seem to appear in the link I've provided above?

Very brief details of the device from an article in The New York Times of 14 February 1898 may also be found here. This is a PDF file, and sadly part of the article is said to be missing.

Do you have information to support your claim that the report is false. Your nation was very into the new fangled electricity in those days, witness the enthusiastic adoption of the electric chair. One would very much like to think that the spanking chair was a reality!

A "friend" of mine trashed the book that he "borrowed" from me. As I have stated in a previous post treasures abound in the Spanking Reaserach rorum amidst the trash and I was delighted that I unearthed this link. I assume it to be a media hoax as does the poster from its introduction on page 73 onward. The criticism has been duly noted. Benjamin Franklin would have been pleased by this invention.

Hi American Way. I was of course only joking about your links. This was an interesting one. I agree that it was probably a hoax, though the New York Times article is a little difficult to explain.

However, C P Hoyt, who is credited with the invention of one of the chairs (I think there are actually two involved here, fictitious or otherwise) was actually Warden of the Colorado State Prison at the time, not of a reformatory for girls. I don't suppose his duties there left him much time or inclination to design spanking exotica for use on young women. Also it's difficult to see how there'd be room for the four paddles specified. All of which points to a hoax.

I did find an article which referred in passing to 'some' of the Industrial Schools for Girls being equipped with these machines. However it later mentioned the New York Times article, so it may have simply taken the information from there.

If the reference in your post indicates that at one stage you had a copy of the book concerned, I feel it imperative to give you advice I regularly dispense:

By all means lend your car, your money, even your wife or husband, but never ever lend books!

One confirmed use of a spanking machine is in a book on prison life in the concentration camps edited by Carlos Whitlock Porter and published by Historical Review Press in 1988. It is readily available under Internet Archives. It is not for the faint of heart so may I sugggest that you go directly to 11 in the first Chapter under "Whup People With Special Spanking Machines".

Here is the direct link. http://www.cwporter.com/partone.htm